Best Worst Movie

Anyone can make a bad movie. But it takes a unique set of circumstances to make a movie so horrible that people are celebrating its badness two decades later.

Michael Stephenson spends a little bit of time exploring this truth in "Best Worst Movie," about the making of the atrocious "Troll 2." The director, who was a child actor in the 1990 horror film, spends a lot more time using the movie as a family reunion/group therapy for the co-stars and filmmakers of the straight-to-video bomb. The priorities seem misplaced, but the result is still sincere and interesting and often very funny.

Better not to try explaining the plot of "Troll 2." There are superfans of the movie who have seen it dozens of times who still don't know what it's about. At some point in the late 1980s, Italian filmmakers descended on Utah, using locals to make this horror film/environmental parable. When it came out, most of the cast was very embarrassed. But over the years, as it slowly gained cult status, most have gained perspective - including the movie's star, George Hardy, now a nice-guy town dentist who embraces his cinematic notoriety.

Hardy and Stephenson travel across the nation, interacting with fans while tracking down a few of the film's co-stars and attempting to explain the phenomenon. The scenes of "Troll 2" interspersed throughout provide much of the comedy, but "Best Worst Movie" becomes hilarious about halfway through when Italian director Claudio Fragasso arrives. He still thinks that the movie is great and that it has become popular in the United States because of supposed similarities with "Harry Potter."

Stephenson enthusiastically goes to every convention and knocks on every door but has trouble organizing his harvest of quirky moments. Hardy is entertaining, but too repetitive for his bounty of screen time. And one of the most interesting characters, a complicated recluse who played Hardy's onscreen wife in "Troll 2," is still a cipher when the documentary is complete.

"Best Worst Movie" doesn't reach the level of greatness of "Anvil: The Story of Anvil" or the arcade game tribute "The King of Kong," two recent documentaries that handled similar subject matter with a little more focus. But there's fun to be had with the pleasant and surprisingly well-adjusted survivors of this movie hell. Most of the cast went on to productive lives, and the movie is bringing pleasure to sold-out crowds 20 years later. Maybe "Troll 2" isn't such a bad film after all.

-- Advisory: This film contains strong language and horrible acting. Forget the last line of this review - clips from "Troll 2" may induce vertigo, vomiting and a loss of religion.